Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 296

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "How to Lead Wisdom from the World's Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers," by David M. Rubenstein.

I had not thought that was possible, for Ronald Reagan would turn seventy shortly after becoming president. How could the American people elect such an old person? I was then thirty-one. I am now seventy-one. This age now seems a bit younger than I had once thought.

I was a junior leader around the White House one day, with the potential to be a senior leader. And the next day I was unemployed. Law firms were not dying to hire a thirty-one-year-old ex–Carter White House aide, with two years of law practice under his belt. Humility came quickly, and fortunately never left. 

It took me many months to find a law firm willing to take a chance. (I told my mother I had so many offers that I was just taking my time sifting through them.) When I finally found one, I realized why law firms were not dying to hire me. I was not experienced in practicing law; no one wanted insights on the Carter White House in the Reagan era; and, with no specialty or real legal training, I was likely to be an average lawyer, at best, for the remainder of my career.

And think about it—as a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day. If I make three good decisions a day, that’s enough. Warren Buffett says he’s good if he makes three good decisions a year. I really believe that. 

All of our senior executives operate the same way I do. They work in the future, they live in the future. None of the people who report to me should really be focused on the current quarter. 

We’ll have a good quarterly conference call or something, and Wall Street will like our quarterly results. People will stop me and say, “Congratulations on your quarter,” and I say, “Thank you.” But what I’m really thinking is, “That quarter was baked three years ago.”

I told her she might also have a future as a presidential aspirant—she had all the requisite skills to be a compelling candidate—but I realized later, as she instinctively knew, that being Oprah was better than being president.

DR: You invented something that became known as the Powell Doctrine.

 

Colin Powell: Not quite. It was invented by a Washington Post reporter who came to see me one day, and he said, “I’m writing an article about the Powell Doctrine.” I said, “Great, what is it?”

DR: Subsequently, President Bush decided to invade Iraq, to topple Saddam Hussein. In hindsight, was that a mistake? Had you known that there were no weapons of mass destruction, would you still have gone forward? 

Condoleezza Rice: What you know today can affect what you do tomorrow, but not what you did yesterday. We simply believed, as all the intelligence agencies around the world did, that he had weapons of mass destruction, that he was reconstituting them, that he was doing it quickly. 

It was on that basis that we decided we finally had to do what the international community had been threatening to do, which was to have serious consequences. In retrospect, I don’t know, if we had known, what we would have done. 

I will say this: I still think the world’s better off without Saddam Hussein. He was a cancer in the region. And while Iraq went through an extraordinarily difficult time, the thing I would do differently is how we rebuilt Iraq. 

We made a lot of mistakes postwar. But I will say this: I would rather be Iraqi than Syrian today. Iraq has a chance now to be a stabilizing element of the new Middle East, because they have an accountable government. The Iraqi Kurds and Baghdad are finally finding some way of dealing with one another. It’s a very different place. 

The Arab Spring was going to happen, and I think Iraq would have made Syria look like child’s play. So you never know what you prevented. You’ll never be able to bring back the lives lost, and you’ll never be able to deal with that. But I think, in the long arc of history, Iraq will turn out okay.

(Nancy Pelosi) As I sat there—and President Bush was ever gracious, welcoming—all of a sudden it was so crowded on my chair I could barely acknowledge what he was saying, I was so distracted with what was happening. I realized that sitting there on that seat with me were Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Alice Paul, you name it. They were all there, right on that chair. I could hear them say, “At last we have a seat at the table.” And then they were gone, and my first thought was, “We want more. We want more.”

DR: When President Clinton became president, you were obviously somebody being considered. Then President Clinton talked to somebody who was pushing for your appointment, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Clinton said, “Well, women don’t want her.” How could that have been the case when you were the leading lawyer in gender discrimination? Why would some women not have wanted you on the Supreme Court? 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Just some women. Most women were overwhelmingly supportive of my nomination. But I had written a comment on Roe v. Wade and it was not 100 percent applauding that decision. What I said was, the court had an easy target because the Texas law was the most extreme in the nation. Abortion could be had only if necessary to save the woman’s life. Doesn’t matter that her health would be ruined, that she was the victim of rape or incest. I thought Roe v. Wade was an easy case, and the Supreme Court could have held that most extreme law unconstitutional and put down its pen. 

Instead, the court wrote an opinion that made every abortion restriction in the country illegal in one fell swoop. That was not the way the court ordinarily operates. It waits till the next case, and the next case. Anyway, some women felt that I should have been 100 percent in favor of Roe v. Wade.